Response from Martin Woodward, GitHub’s VP of Developer Relations:
Sorry for the inconvenience @koepnick - while searching across all repos has required being logged in for a long time, when we enhanced the search capabilities earlier in the 2023 we had to extend this to repos as well (see https://github.blog/changelog/2023-06-07-code-search-now-requires-login/).
This is primarily to ensure we can support the load for developers on GitHub and help protect the servers from being overwhelmed by anonymous requests from bots etc.
The code is still accessible, you just can’t use the code search function in the web, which normal git doesn’t have anyway.
Yes, precisely. They built a useful feature and are now trying to wall off the garden. Enshittification.